Frontier constitutions : Christianity and colonial empire in the nineteenth-century Philippines

Author:John D. Blanco

Summary:"Frontier Constitutions is a pathbreaking study of the cultural transformations arrived at by Spanish colonists, native-born Creoles, mestizos (Chinese and Spanish), and indigenous colonial subjects in the Philippines during the nineteenth-century crisis of colonial hegemony, and of the social anomie that resulted from this crisis in law and politics. John D. Blanco argues that modernity in the colonial Philippines should not be understood as simply an imperfect version of a European model but as a unique set of expressions emerging out of contradictions and tensions - expressions that, in turn, sanctioned the formation of new political communities around the precariousness of Spanish rule. Drawing from original sources in Spanish and Tagalog, Blanco shows how artists and writers - in works as varied as plays, novels, histories, paintings, and reports submitted to the Spanish monarchy - struggled to synthesize these contradictions as they attempted to secure the colonial order or, conversely, to achieve Philippine independence."--Jacket